Tom's Blood
by Glitterglue
Summary: He didn't see Tom's face as he died in that alleyway, but he probably looked just like that." Jake Sully knows all about blood.


_Dr. Grace Augustine: Do you have any lab experience?_

_Jake Sully: I dissected a frog once._

-

Jake knows about blood. Knows what it does, what it means, who it makes you. It started with a scalpel, tugging it hesitantly down the underside of a frog while his high school lab partner hid her eyes behind gloved hands. Peeling back its elastic, moist skin, watching tiny rivulets of blood drip down into the small metal tray. He recognized it then, so young and unprepared, knew the smell and taste and the way his neck felt tight in its presence.

_This is what death looks like_, he realized, unfazed and calm. He remembered it like an old friend.

-

There was death in Venezuela. Blood seeping into the dark brown soil, smeared down ragged tree trunks and damp, green leaves. Spreading across rocks and rivers like it spread into Jake Sully's standard issue camo fatigues. His insides on the outside, laying in a man-sized metal tray. The doctors didn't look at his face, didn't say his name, and all he could do was stare at the scalpels in their hands. His blood on their gloves. He thought about the frog and laughed. He didn't feel like a man anymore.

-

It took him two hours to get there. Public transportation being what it was for a man like him. A rolling, dissected frog. One wheel got caught on a crevice in the sidewalk. He imagined Tom stepping on it as he violently jerked at the spokes, freeing himself and turning down a nameless side street. _Step on a crack, break your brother's back. _There wasn't a lot of time, those RDA suits made that perfectly clear, and there was still so much he had to do before tucking himself into some temporary deathbed for the next 6 years. But there had to be time for this, he thought, there _had_ to be.

He knew it as soon as he saw it. Because Jake Sully knows blood. It's brown and old and dirty from days of exposure. It creeps like a halo or a shadow or a wine stain down the side of the bricks, darker and thicker on the cement slab sidewalk.

Tom's blood, so much like his own.

There would be no funeral. This was enough.

-

Her hands were covered with it, it's the first thing he noticed, before the pain that tattooed her face like war paint, before the prone figure at her feet. She screamed at him to leave, to go away, never come back but he thought she wasn't really howling at him. The ash in the air, the splinters raining on them like bee stings, yes, the blood on her hands.

He didn't see Tom's face as he died in that alleyway, but he probably looked just like that.

He wanted it to go away, too.

-

Norm brought him a bowl of water so he could wash himself, towering in his human form, he was thankful he didn't have to look at his friend swathed in blue. There was dirt on his flesh, in his hair and underneath his knees. That was the hardest to get to. He asked for privacy and it was granted, executing a controlled fall out of his chair as soon as he was alone. He carefully peeled his shirt off, mindful of the mask covering his face, keeping him alive, pale white skin appearing from underneath clothes.

This wasn't him, he wanted to believe. He felt like that damn frog again, twitching on a lab table. He felt like Tom.

"You do not want help," she murmured from somewhere behind him, approaching him silently. He would have heard her if he was himself, the real him that was laying still and silent somewhere within the forest. It wasn't a question. He shook his head, running a rag down his arms, "I got this."

"You are bleeding," she informed him, crouching, near but not hovering. His eyes ran along the length of his arm until he saw the small cut she was referring to, something he could have done anytime in this body, weak and unsuitable as it was.

"I've had worse," he reminded her. "You've given me worse," he added lightly and smiled when she bared her teeth at him in good natured annoyance.

"I could carry you to the stream," she offered, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, nervously. She didn't want to upset him, he understood. He just shook his head again.

"It's my blood (_Tom's blood_, something traitorous within him thought), I should do it myself."

"Not all," she corrected, indicating a deep red smudge that meandered down one shoulder and across his chest. "That is mine."

She was bleeding, he recalled, as she held him in the ruined lab, running her hands everywhere, proving to herself that he was whole._ My Jake, my Jake, my Jake. _

"I will clean my own blood," she told him, decisiveness squaring her shoulders as she stood, "And I will clean yours. They are the same now, my Jake."

As she lifted him into her arms, his fresh cut smeared a line of crimson along her collar bone, inexplicably causing them both to break into toothy grins. "Ours," she affirmed.

"Just yours and mine," he agreed.

-

It's the smell, so familiar without being comforting. It lingered in the air for such a long time that he didn't realize it was gone until it suddenly returned, strong and biting as he raced through the boughs of their new Home Tree. It had taken months of life, fragile and budding, ferns suturing battle scared earth, rivers swelling with Neytiri's belly, washing away bones and bent metal, until Pandora was herself once again.

It stung his nose as he rounded a final turn, ears pricked forward, picking up his mate's cries and a higher, shrill yelp. He slowed as he drew near, listening to Max's soft voice over the subtle thud of his bare feet on the bark. When he drew back the curtain of vines between himself and the people within, his eyes went immediately to the bundle in the crook of her arms, struggling fussily against his mother's firm grip.

"Mine?" he asked, stepping forward, eyes never straying, not even to glance at the stained bedclothes that had already been stripped and tucked into the corner.

She smiled brightly, holding out her arms, "_Ours_."

He knows blood.


End file.
